


Lines Drawn in the Dust

by JadeCharmer



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Swearing, past relationship, sad fic, savior complex that is blinding to reality, sidekick bucky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-26
Updated: 2014-01-26
Packaged: 2018-01-10 04:40:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1155183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JadeCharmer/pseuds/JadeCharmer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>As they eat in silence, Darcy can’t help but ruminate. It’s one thing for SHIELD to strong arm and get their way. She’s, unfortunately, gotten used to that, what with the whole shadowy covert agency thing. But for Steve to do it? It’s insulting and high-minded and she’s just about damn done with it. She was done with it when Bucky first showed up five days ago.</i>
</p><p>Where Darcy leaves, but finds she can't really leave everything behind, as much as she would really, really like to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lines Drawn in the Dust

**Author's Note:**

> Written last night in an attempt to cheer up theladyscribe, but it's really not a cheering up fic...

He’s standing outside her door when she gets home. His stance is military, but like he’s trying to forget it. His dark hair is actually cut and his facial hair is less scruffy than what he had yesterday, so there is that. Weary annoyance fills her body at the sight of him, just as it did yesterday. He’s been here every day this week and, sure as the sun will rise, he’ll certainly be here again tomorrow.

“Nope,” Darcy informs him as she walks past, sliding her key in the lock of the door. “And you can tell Steve to knock it off, too, when you report back to him. I’m out of patience.”

“Sorry, darling. As much as I would love for it to be true, you don’t give me orders. At least,” he grins as he tips his head, considering, “not those kinds of orders. I’d be very amenable to other kinds, though.”

Darcy sighs and pushes open her front door, ignoring Barnes’ terrible attempts at flirting for about the fiftieth time in five days. She doesn’t go in her apartment, though. Instead, she stands in the doorway, grocery bags weighing heavy on her arms, and slumps her shoulders forward in defeat, knowing this is pointless. Looking back over her shoulder, she sees Bucky still standing in the hallway, complete with a wide grin. 

“You’re just going to pick the lock again if I try to leave you out here, aren’t you?” she asks, resigned.

“Yep,” he answers cheerfully. Stepping forward, he relieves her of most of the grocery bags and edges his way past her gently into her apartment. “So you might as well save us all a step, darling.”

With another sigh, Darcy closes and locks and bolts the door behind her. At least she had the foresight to stop and pick up more wine on her way home from work today. She might have looked like a bag lady riding the train home with all her groceries and an indeterminate number of reusable bags she takes with her to the liquor store, but it’s worth it, especially right at this moment when her patience is being sorely tested to the limit.

“I’m not making dinner tonight,” she informs him as she follows him into the kitchen. She grabs one of the take-out menus she has on the fridge, this one for the local Italian deli that has the best Cheddar Beef Panini she’s ever tasted, and tosses it in his direction. “We’re ordering out. And,” she informs him with a pointed look, “we’re not threatening the delivery boy this time.”

“It’s Chicago, Darce,” Bucky dismisses as he scans at the offerings on the print-out. “They get it all the time.”

“That’s an insulting generalization,” she tells him. “Besides, you know I love this city. Way better than New York.”

Bucky raises an eyebrow at her defensive stance, but lets it go. He doesn’t need to say that part of the allure of Chicago over New York is because Steve is in New York, but the truth hangs in the air anyway. 

Darcy waves her hand dismissively, as if to clear the awkwardness that’s taken up residence, and tells him what she wants from the deli before going to her bedroom to change out of her work clothes. Bucky places their order while she changes and, by the time she’s put away her groceries and opened a bottle of beer to have with her sandwich, the door is ringing with their food. 

Bucky answers it, of course, because apparently Steve and the Avengers have decided she’s incapable of even doing the tiniest things for herself anymore. There’s no more information that’s come in on the threat against her, though Darcy suspects the initial report to have been false anyway. She’s practically a nobody, especially since she decided to cut her losses, along with her ties and connections, and leave New York.

That doesn’t stop them from sending a former assassin to be her shadow, though.

As they eat in silence, Darcy can’t help but ruminate. It’s one thing for SHIELD to strong arm and get their way. She’s, unfortunately, gotten used to that, what with the whole shadowy covert agency thing. But for Steve to do it? It’s insulting and high-minded and she’s just about damn done with it. She was done with it when Bucky first showed up five days ago.

She swallows the bite of her sandwich and picks up her phone, dialing a number she still can’t shake from her memory. Steve greets her on the second ring, his voice warm, even if he sounds distracted when he answers. She can feel herself wanting to slip into old habits, to act like they’re still a couple, but she forces herself to move on.

“Are you about done sending homeless looking men to stand at my door?” she demands, pushing her annoyance to the forefront and all other feelings to the background. “Because I’d like to inform you that you don’t get to pull the plug on us, telling me it’s for my own damn good while doing so like some Neanderthal caveman, then send a freaking bodyguard to watch over me. One who is going to eat me out of house and home and has the manners of an alley cat,” she ignores Bucky’s insulted protest, tossing him another bag of chips to keep him quiet.

“Bill us for the food. Bill Tony, bill SHIELD,” Steve dismisses, his tone direct and no-nonsense. She gets to talk to the commander now, apparently, instead of the ex-boyfriend. Goodie. “He stays.”

Darcy can’t help it. She literally screams into the phone. Not any words, specifically, more just a gargle of nonsense vowels and consonants, pure fury and frustration finally to the surface. Bucky perks up from his seat, mustard still in the corner of his mouth, amusement practically dancing on his face as he shamelessly listens in to the conversation.

“Love you, too, sweetheart,” Steve replies and, damn him, her heart still skips a beat at those words, even if she thinks he’s partly saying them in jest. It’s Steve, though. It’s not in his playbook, no matter how annoyed or frustrated he gets, to say those words and not mean it. Bastard, she thinks, wanting to hate him so much. Manipulative and infuriating bastard.

Without a word, she turns sharply away from Bucky and stalks down the hallway to her bedroom. It’s not much, but it at least gives her the illusion of privacy. She shuts the door behind her, leaning heavily against it. Closing her eyes, she slumps to the floor, exhausted, as the frustration leaves her body. She’s been angry too long. Angry at Steve, angry at the Avengers. Angry at SHIELD. Angry over losing her old life because of manipulations and lies. Angry at losing her friends. It’s taking too much out of her to hold on to it when, really, all she wants to do is let go and move on. She wants to be able to live the new life she keeps trying to start here, to forget everything she had in the past because it isn’t coming back.

Steve is talking on the other end of the phone, but she’s not listening, not replying. Instead, she’s thinking, trying to figure out the words for what she needs to do next.

“Darce? Darcy?” comes Steve’s voice, demanding and slightly frantic at her lack of a reply. 

“Still here,” she answers, her tone emotionless. She can hear Steve’s breathing on the other side of the line and they sit there for a few moments, quiet, no words said. Just listening to each other breathe, each lost in their own thoughts.

“You have to stop, Steve,” she whispers in the dark of her room. “I can’t keep doing this.”

There’s a bit of silence, then Steve sighs. “I know that it’s unfair to you-”

“Unfair?” Darcy cuts off, her voice bitter. “We passed ‘unfair’ a long time ago, buddy. We’re in invasive and completely demented territory now. You have Bucky acting as my freaking shadow. People are asking questions and he decided the best cover story was to tell them he was my boyfriend. Complete with kissing.”

“We’ll bring him back and send Natasha out instead,” Steve answers tightly.

“No,” she informs him with a shake of her head. “I’m done with this. You don’t get to play musical Russian assassins with me, Rogers. And this whole company line about doing this for my benefit, doing this because I care about you, that ends now, too. We’re putting a moratorium on that bullshit.”

“I do care about you,” Steve tells her.

Darcy can feel the hot tears starting to sting in her eyes. “Bullshit, Rogers,” she repeats, practically biting out the words. “You don’t drive away the person you care about.”

“Darce, you know I care. You know I love you,” he says fiercely. “I just can’t protect you right now. I can’t keep you safe. There are bigger things at play that are out of my control. But I’m working on it.”

“Then you tell me that, Rogers,” she says hotly. “You tell me why you’re doing what you’re doing. You be honest with me. You don’t get to give me the party line, some bullshit diatribe about ‘it isn’t working’ and ‘being around the Avengers, around me, is going to hurt you,’ especially since, when I do leave, you won’t leave me alone.”

The tears are freely streaming down her cheeks now, bitter and hot as she continues, brokenly, “You haunt my life, pulling me back each time I think I’ve managed to get away, each time I think I’ve managed to finally get you out from under my skin. So fine, if that’s the way you want to play it, Bucky stays. But you don’t talk to me.”

She can hear Steve’s voice starting to reply even as she hangs up. She drops the phone to the ground beside her and leans forward to rest her head against her bent knees even as the phone rings, vibrating across the wood floor. She knows without glancing that it’s Steve and ignores the call. It rings again, this time from a number she doesn’t recognize, but she figures Jarvis probably helped to reroute the call. As if she’s going to fall for that amateur hour tactic. After she send the call to voicemail, Darcy turns off the device. She wishes her fondness for Apple products would have failed her for her most recent phone purchase because she’d like nothing more than to take the battery out of the device, too. 

Instead, she tosses it in the bathroom cupboard between a stack of towels to buffer the ring when, inevitably, Jarvis remotely accesses her phone to turn it back on. With the phone, and Steve with it, effectively out of sight, even if not out of mind, Darcy walks back out to the kitchen where Bucky is cleaning up the last of the mess from dinner. The half of her sandwich that’s left is wrapped up in the butcher’s paper it came in, long gone cold during her conversation with Steve. Without a word, he puts it in the microwave to reheat it for her.

“Good talk?” he asks eventually, crossing his arms across his chest and leaning against the counter as the microwave hums behind him.

Darcy shoots a glare at the man. She says nothing as she pulls a bottle of wine from the fridge and two glasses out of the dishwasher. 

“Steve cares,” Bucky continues, his voice low. His eyes, blue and brilliant, are sympathetic as he sits down across the counter from her, placing her hot sandwich between them. “He’s an idiot, but he cares.”

“Doesn’t matter much at this point now, does it?” she answers as she pours the wine, one for herself and one for her babysitter-slash-stalker. 

As she takes a drink, she knows she’s just lying to herself. Because it’s Steve, it’ll always matter.


End file.
